FocalLens: Instruction Tuning Enables Zero-Shot Conditional Image Representations

This paper was accepted at the Workshop on Foundation Models in the Wild at ICLR 2025. Visual understanding is inherently contextual - what we focus on in an image depends on the task at hand. For instance, given an image of a person holding a bouquet of flowers, we may focus on either the person such as their clothing, or the type of flowers, depending on the context of interest. Yet, most existing image encoding paradigms represent an image as a fixed, generic feature vector, overlooking the potential needs of prioritizing varying visual information for different downstream use cases. In…